by nerds... " I’ve written about Enceladus about thirty two bajillion times, because it’s fascinating, and photogenic as heck" given just how nerdy this is no doubt it will have fewer responses than more mainstream non nerdy articles on slashdot.

No, he CAN'T have his five minutes back - you know the rules, no refunds on Slashdot except through the complaints department.

"The Bad Astronomer" has been around long enough, and has enough credibility, that anyone who claims he's a karma whore is de-facto neither a nerd nor a geek and should gerroff our collective lawns.

Obvious Geometry is indeed Obvious. This guy, Euclid, wrote some of the Obvious Geometry down and used it as a teaching manual. Nobody had done that before. Everyone in his time knew the rules he was describing (Archimedes regarded them as insultingly simple), but few had understood the fundamentals (what was axiomatic, what was derivative) and absolutely nobody had thought of actually explaining things before. The result of him doing so caused the number of mathematicians and their skills to explode. The learning curve had become dramatically shallower.

This is really no different. Sure, it's basic but the learning curve of WHY it works, HOW it works and WHEN/WHERE it can be used is NOT common knowledge. This makes teaching the relationship of maths and astronomy a cakewalk. I have no objections to more people seeing why geometry and maths are relevant (a common complaint is that they aren't ever used anywhere, but that's because nobody explains why, yes, they are). I regard it as the sole opportunity for turning the world into people who can think for themselves.

1) What sort of freaky small time window and lighting conditions do they need to get a picture at a range of 185 km [ciclops.org], and can they do it consistently? That's insanely close for how fast this spacecraft is traveling across the surface of the moon, and for the lighting conditions.

2) Unrelated, but what the hell are those things at lower left (and two of them crossing in upper-mid-to-upper-right)this pic [ciclops.org] from a more more sane 17000 km? Ridiculously long crater chains from ejecta, or something rolling/bounci

Most of the comments on other articles are opinions. Political articles seem to get the most back and forth comments. This article just presents interesting facts, and simple facts that people accept don't elicit much opinions.

So now that we know all this stuff the Bad Astronomer said, I want to lay down a challenge. I noticed the Bad Astronomer included no actual plume information. How tall ARE the plumes? How far away are they from each other? How did you calculate your figures? I won't be able to work on it until after my real work, but lets see if any enterprising Slashdot aficionado can come up with the info, preferably using math, not an online source. Don't make me break out my TI-86 and be the first to come up with

A girl in my highschool back in 1988 was used voyager I or II photos (I can't recall which) to calculate the depth of craters on a couple of Jupiter's moons. Which is little different than what the article is describing, but it seems shadows have a lot more information encoded in them. This girl and I ended up winning the science fair and going on to the International science fair, where I felt a bit out of my league. She won a few awards. Apparently at that point no one had thought to do that up to tha